THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408120526
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BARRETT R. RICHARDSON
LENGTH: Long : 133 lines
SHERMAN'S MARCH
CYNTHIA BASS
Villard Books. 228 pp. $21.
SAPELO'S PEOPLE
A Long Walk Into Freedom
WILLIAM S. McFEELY
W.W. Norton & Co. 199 pp. $18.95.
ON AUG. 11, 1880, at a veterans' rally, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman allegedly said: ``War is hell.''
The man some revere as the Civil War's greatest hero and others revile as Satan incarnate may have been misquoted by the press he abhorred. In Sherman's March, Cynthia Bass' fictionalized account of the general's march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, Ga., Sherman is quoted as saying: ``There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory. But boys, it is all hell.''
Forget the accuracy of the quote. Its meaning is clearly brought to life in Sherman's March as Bass weaves the facts of the campaign into magnificent fiction, portraying the march and its impact on the military participants, North and South, and its civilian victims. The author captures the crusty Sherman and also profiles in depth two other characters, a Union Army captain and a Southern farm wife, widowed and made a refugee by the war.
Their lives intersect in a seamless and compelling narrative that pulls no punches in portraying the grimness rather than the glory of the war many have mythologized. The novel is overwhelmingly gory at times, lyrical at others. Swift-paced, it propels the reader to its final denouement, the death of a captured Confederate prisoner who was hanged by his vengeful adversaries.
Bass paints a portrait of Sherman that is sympathetic but not flattering. The most maligned Civil War general comes across as the most misunderstood:
``Never mind that when (Gen. Joseph) Johnston surrendered I offered a peace more generous than Grant's and kinder than Lincoln's;'' Sherman says, ``never mind that I was the only ranking general to criticize Reconstruction. No: I was the rapist of Queen Georgia and the Carolina Princesses.''
Was he penitent? Hardly. ``I have only one regret regarding the March, and that's that we didn't do it sooner. We should have begun that hell the first year. . . We could've had the South on her knees by Easter, at our feet by Memorial Day.''
Sherman's attitude evolved from his experience as administrator of the captured Confederate city of Memphis, Tenn., where his benignity to civilians was repaid with hostility and guerrilla tactics. As a result he concluded that ``war cannot be waged civilly, and still be war.'' It was time to ``take the pain from the battlefield and bring the war home.''
To accomplish this, Sherman issued his infamous Special Order Number 120 - explicit instructions for the March to the Sea - which altered modern warfare by wreaking havoc on civilians. The order sanctioned foraging on the countryside and the destruction of mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., in places where guerrillas and bushwhackers molested the march.
The toll inflicted by Sherman's army of 60,000 included more than 35,000 bales of cotton, 7,000 horses and 20,000 head of cattle, plus an estimated $100 million in food, houses, jewelry, slave cabins, state buildings, cannons, organs, pianos, steamboats and other items. But casualties were light, with only 103 dead.
The march may have had as its purpose a change of base to allow Sherman to smash through the Carolinas and attack Robert E. Lee at Petersburg, where he and Ulysses S. Grant were in a virtual stalemate of trench warfare.
What it accomplished was the creation of ``a wedge of desert in the midst of some of the richest and loveliest real estate in the New World.'' Not surprisingly, Sherman felt ``no side will comprehend I was a peacemaker; that after four years of this most terrible of wars, I hastened what both sides most ardently desired - not Victory, but Peace.''
Sherman's march to the sea had a profound impact on thousands of Southern civilians in and out of its path. Although much has been written about hardships caused by the march, scant attention has been paid to slaves affected by it. Pulitzer Prize-winner William S. McFeely, a University of Georgia history professor, has written a jewel of a book documenting the tribulations of a group of black people swept up in the tides of the Civil War.
In Sapelo's People, McFeely lyrically describes the picturesque barrier island off the coast of Georgia and records the triumphs and tragedies of its inhabitants. He begins with interviews of some of the 67 people still living on Sapelo, flashes back to the past and returns to the present to wrap up his poignant narrative.
The author was drawn to Sapelo on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of its First African Baptist Church. His description of the black religious experience there is classic and compelling.
Sapelo's people are descendants of the slaves of Thomas Spalding, who died in 1851. In 1861 when the Union Navy began patrolling the coast off Georgia, Spalding's heirs put their able-bodied slaves aboard boats and herded them to the mainland. There they were marched 163 miles to Brunswick County in the interior of Georgia, placing them in Sherman's path.
When federal soldiers informed the Sapelo people that they were free, they had to decide, for the first time in their lives, what to do: go or stay. Those choosing to return to the coast were among 25,000 freed people who tagged along with 57,000 Union soldiers, who did not relish their company. In one case, a Union general solved the problem by crossing a river and removing a pontoon bridge, stranding the refugees, some of whom drowned trying to cross.
Although the call of home was strong, the Sapelo people received further incentive to return from an order by Gen. Rufus Saxton that allowed freed slaves to take possession of abandoned farmlands on the islands south of Charleston.
``By working the island's land, by laughing, weeping, praying on it, being born and dying on it, the former slaves traded possessors and became the island's, and it became theirs,'' McFeely writes.
After the war, the Spalding family, bolstered by President Andrew Johnson's nullification of the law giving land to freedmen, returned and reclaimed their former holdings, forcing from Sapelo nearly 600 people who had no previous connection with the island. Although they lacked plots of prime land, Sapelo's black farmers remained independent, holding onto their homeplaces and subsisting without having to contract to work in field gangs.
McFeely says that his book is meant to be neither a history of Sapelo nor a treatise on the problems of its inhabitants, but it is both and a lot more. The island and its people have captivated McFeely, and Sapelo's People, which he calls a ``meditation on race,'' casts a spell, leaving readers with indelible impressions of a secluded world where memories of another time hang heavy in the humid air. MEMO: Barrett R. Richardson is a retired staff editor who lives in Portsmouth
and teaches English part time at Tidewater Community College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by RICHARD AQUAN
Jacket painting by JOHN BERKEY
Jacket design by WENDELL MINOR
Jacket painting by JUNE MCCOY BALL
by CNB